Although Google Analytics and other standard third-party utilities show how much traffic my own articles on The Unz Review regularly receive, they fail to inform me exactly who is reading my work or how much influence these pieces may have. But every now and then a burst of external illumination suggests that at least some of my writings of the last dozen years have had a significant, perhaps even transformative impact.
Along with everyone else, I’ve been reading the media accounts of Elon Musk’s DOGE project. In that controversial effort, small teams of youthful engineers had been granted access to some of the most important systems of the federal government, resulting in widespread public claims of the massive waste and corruption that they had allegedly found and prompting the prospect of huge cuts in those gigantic bureaucracies. For example, the $40 billion USAID seems likely to be almost completely gutted by the Trump Administration, with plans to cut its 10,000 person staff by 97%.
One of the more prominent DOGE investigators has been 25-year-old Gavin Kliger, a 2020 graduate of UC Berkeley with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who has been named a senior advisor to the Office of Personnel Management. His role at that agency and the IRS has been sufficiently important that the New York Times recently published a short article describing his activities.
These public attacks on enormous government agencies naturally inspired fierce counter-attacks by the many media outlets opposed to Musk’s project, and their journalists have sifted the background of those newly super-empowered twenty-somethings for controversial material.
Last week I’d noticed a sudden unexpected burst of new readership for “Our American Pravda,” an article that I had published a dozen years ago. This piece had eventually inspired my long series of a similar name.
I soon discovered that this new attention had resulted from a wave of attacks against Kliger, including a hit-piece by Mother Jones, a prominent left-liberal investigative publication:
In a since-deleted Substack post, an engineer working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote about his radicalization, noting a key influence was an essay by Ron Unz…
The Substack post, titled “Why I Joined DOGE,” was written by DOGE engineer Gavin Kliger…
The post was published Friday and was still available online Sunday morning around 9:30 a.m. ET. It was deleted on Sunday. In the post, Kliger credits Unz’s “Our American Pravda“—a 2013 essay published in The American Conservative that railed against what Unz claimed were systemic media failures—with beginning the engineer’s “political awakening.”
“Reading it was like putting on glasses for the first time,” writes Kliger, whose LinkedIn says he is a senior advisor to the Director for Technology and Delivery at the Office of Personnel Management. “The issue wasn’t just bias—it was that entire narratives, the ones we took for granted as truth, were carefully curated illusions.” (Mother Jones saved a copy of Kliger’s Substack post before it was deleted.)
“Guilt by association” is a common media tactic employed to discredit political opponents. Someone else is somehow connected to the intended victim, and the argument is made that the massive iniquities of the former individual should carry over to the latter. The Mother Jones hit piece relied upon this doubtful approach.
After reporting Kliger’s declaration that he had been heavily influenced by my April 2013 article, most of the remaining text focused on some of the controversial or ultra-controversial pieces that I had written during the dozen years that followed, suggesting that these therefore tainted the young DOGE engineer. My lengthy American Pravda series runs well over 100 articles and nearly a million words, so the writers mined it for explosive quotations although Kliger claimed that he had remained unaware of that much larger body of work:
In an email to Mother Jones on Sunday, Kliger said he did not read the later “American Pravda” posts from Unz.
“I specifically referred to this 2013 article from The American Conservative, ‘Our American Pravda.’ Note the ‘Our’,” Kliger wrote. “I have neither referenced or read [the other work in the “‘American Pravda” series].” (The DOGE engineer also noted The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf recommended the 2013 Unz essay in a blog.)
As Kliger explained, a writer at the very respectable Atlantic had strongly recommended my article when it first appeared. But if the journalists attacking him had further investigated, they would have found that the same had also been true of prominent free market economist Tyler Cowen, noted author Eamonn Fingleton writing in Forbes, and various other very mainstream writers and public intellectuals. Influential libertarian historian Tom Woods had heavily excerpted my article and Alexander Cockburn’s leftist Counterpunch publication had republished it in its entirety, as had ZeroHedge.
So if Mother Jones saw fit to interrogate and condemn Kliger for my far more controversial subsequent writings, why should all those other individuals and publications have escaped similar criticism? Indeed, my 2013 article became one of the most widely read pieces in The American Conservative that year, and as far as I recall almost nobody at the time had criticized or condemned it.
This underscores the extreme unfairness of the Mother Jones attack against Kliger.
Furthermore, this barely scraped the surface of the absurdities of the “guilt by association” argument used to tarnish Musk’s young DOGE protege.
Given their investigation of my body of work, the Mother Jones writers must surely be aware that just a few months before that 2013 article I had also published “The Myth of American Meritocracy” in that same publication. This exceptionally long and detailed 26,000 word analysis had documented the huge biases and unfairness in the admissions systems of Harvard and our other most elite American colleges.
New York Times Columnist David Brooks soon ranked my piece as probably the best magazine article published in America that year, a verdict strongly seconded by a top editor at the Economist.
One of my central findings had been the very strong quantitative evidence that Harvard and the other Ivy League schools were practicing racial discrimination by surreptitiously maintaining Asian Quotas in their admissions policies, and this soon prompted the New York Times to organize an important symposium on that explosive topic in which I eagerly participated. The Yale Political Union and the Yale Law School invited me to give a couple of public lectures on that controversial conclusion and the rest of my Meritocracy analysis. A very long list of other writers and public intellectuals commented on my article, an overwhelming majority of them quite favorably, with their discussions appearing in Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and various other publications. These included such prominent public figures as Harvard Prof. Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria.
So if Mother Jones is now raking Kliger over the coals for admitting that he had been heavily influenced by one of my articles from April 2013, why should they not do the same with David Brooks, Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria, the editors of the New York Times, and all the others who had highlighted and strongly promoted a far longer article from November 2012?
Furthermore, in 2016 I published my first print collection, The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays, a 700 page volume containing both those articles and many others, and it attracted strongly favorable comments by some very distinguished academic scholars and journalists:
With high intelligence, common sense, and advanced statistical skills, presented transparently and accessibly, Ron Unz has for decades been addressing key issues in a rapidly changing America, enlightening us on the implications and effects of bilingual programs in American schools, clarifying the issues around crime and immigration so often distorted in political and popular discussion, placing the question of an increased minimum wage effectively on the national agenda, and addressing most provocatively the issue of affirmative action and admission to selective colleges and universities, revealing some aspects of this ever disputed question that have never been noted or discussed publicly before. He is one of our most valuable discussants and analysts of public issues.—Nathan Glazer, Professor Emeritus of Education and Sociology, Harvard University, and author of Beyond the Melting Pot.
Few people on the planet are smarter than Ron Unz or have more intellectual curiosity. This fascinating and provocative collection of essays explores a remarkable range of topics, many of them high profile, some of them arcane. Unz’s analysis is always serious and invariably challenges prevailing wisdoms, which is to say there are a lot of controversial arguments in this book. No one is likely to agree with every one of his conclusions, but we would be better off if there were more people like Ron Unz among us. —John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of The Israel Lobby.
Ron Unz is a brilliant essayist. His interests run from ancient history and black holes to contemporary issues like racial quotas and the minimum wage. He moves swiftly to the heart of a subject with cogent analysis and limpid argument. This collection of essays sparkles with unexpected gems ranging from critiques of the mainstream press to appreciation of dissenters from common wisdom such as General Bill Odom and Alexander Cockburn. In every paragraph of these essays the reader enjoys a penetrating intelligence at work. —Nicholas Wade, former writer and editor for The New York Times, and author of Before the Dawn, The Faith Instinct, and A Troublesome Inheritance.
Over the past two decades as an original thinker and writer Ron Unz has tackled complex and significant subjects such as immigration, education, economics, race, and the press, pushing aside common assumptions. This book brings together in one volume these pieces from a variety of publications. Unlike other essayists on culture and politics, Unz shreds ideology and relies on statistical data to support his often groundbreaking ideas, such as his 2010 essay on “The Myth of Hispanic Crime.” And his 2014 efforts to put a $12 an hour minimum wage bill before California voters is an example of how the action of an individual can draw public attention to an issue he believes is necessary for the economic health of the Republic. Anyone reading this book will learn a great deal about America from an incisive writer and scholar who has peeled back layers of conventional wisdom to expose the truth on issues of prime importance today. —Sydney Schanberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning former reporter and editor for The New York Times, whose story inspired the 1984 film The Killing Fields.
Thus, Kliger seems to have had quite good company in his favorable reaction to my 2013 article, demonstrating that the attack against him on those grounds was entirely self-defeating.
